Poetry in Medicine
featuring
Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1809-1894)
Oliver Wendell Holmes was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He studied medicine at Harvard and in France. Returning from Paris in 1835, he received the degree of Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School in 1836 and began practice in Boston. As a youngster in medical practice, Holmes challenged the medical profession with his now famous article, The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, in which he blamed doctors, nurses and midwives for the spread of streptococcus infections to mothers and babies. He was condemned and later praised for the accuracy of his observations. Holmes published in 1856 the first of a long series of poems and prose works beginning with The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. During the same period, he wrote Old Ironsides, which saved the battleship Constitution from being junked; The Battle of Bunker Hill; The Wonderful One Hoss Shay, The Chambered Nautilus and many other well known poems.
…The morning visit-not till sickness falls
In the charmed circles of your own safe walls;
Till fever's throb and pain's relentless rack
Stretch you all helpless on your aching back;
Not till you play the patient in your turn,
The morning visit's mystery shall you learn.
'Tis a small matter in your neighbor's case,
To charge your fee for showing him your face;
You skip upstairs, inquire, inspect, and touch,
Prescribe, take leave, and off to twenty such.
But when at length, by fate's transferred decree,
The visitor becomes, the visitee,
Oh, then, indeed, it pulls another string;
Your ox is gored, and that's a different thing!….
Be gentle, then, though Art's unsparing rules
Give you the handling of her sharpest tools;
Use them not rashly - sickness is enough;
Be always "ready," but be never "rough."
But simple kindness, kneeling by the bed
To shift the pillow for the sick man's head,
Give the fresh draught to cool the lips that burn,
Fan the hot brow, the weary frame to turn -
Kindness, untutored by our grave M.D.'s,
But Nature's graduate, when she schools to please,
Wins back more sufferers with her voice and smile
Than all the trumpery in the druggist's pile.
…Once more, be quiet: coming up the stair,
Don't be a plantigrade, a human bear,
But, stealing softly on the silent toe,
Reach the sick chamber ere you're heard below:
Whatever changes there may greet your eyes,
Let now your looks proclaim the least surprise;
It's not your business by your face to show
All that your patient does not want to know;
Nay, use your optics with considerate care,
And don't abuse your privilege to stare.
But if your eyes may probe him overmuch,
Beware still further how you rudely touch;
Don't clutch his carpus in your icy fist,
But warm your fingers ere you take the wrist.
If the poor victim needs must be percussed,
Don't make an anvil of his aching bust;
(Doctors exist within a hundred miles;
Who thump a thorax as they'd hammer piles;)
If you must listen to his doubtful chest,
Catch the essentials, and ignore the rest.
Spare him; the sufferer wants of you and art
A track to steer by, not a finished chart.
So of your questions: don't in mercy try
To pump your patient absolutely dry;
He's not a mollusk squirming in a dish
You're not Agassiz, and he's not a fish.
And last, not least, in each perplexing case,
Learn the sweet magic of a cheerful face;
Not always smiling, but at least serene,
When grief and anguish cloud the anxious scene.
Each look, each movement, every word and tone,
Should tell your patient you are all his own;
Not the mere artist, purchased to attend,
But the warm, ready, self-forgetting friend,
Whose genial visit in itself combines
The best of cordials, tonics, anodynes…
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main--
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulf enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed--
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings--
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
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